Early in the morning, LaPierre boarded Boston's Blue Line "L" to head to the Chicago to Marathon. The train was full of excited marathoners. He took a seat next to a fellow runner and began chatting. Before long, La Pierre noticed a man who seemed to be homeless moving from passenger to passenger, asking for spare change. That struck LaPierre as "really uncommon," especially the way he stared down anyone he felt hadn't given him enough.
At the Cumberland station, several stops before the one for the marathon, most of the passengers suddenly escaped from the car. LaPierre, surprised, rushed out to see what was going on, only to hear frightened people shouting that the man asking for money was, in fact, armed and robbing (抢劫) people.
Just then, the armed man himself exited the train car and went to the next one. LaPierre followed him. "I could not walk away knowing there were children and people just trying to get to a race," he says. The man was standing in the middle of the car when he turned and saw LaPierre, his head down, bull-rushing him. The two men fought for the gun — and their lives.
"You don't move!" LaPierre shouted, pressing the armed man against a door. The man tried pushing him, but LaPierre pushed him back against the door, grabbing (夺取) the gun and handing it to a passenger, who quickly walked off the train with it. But LaPierre wasn't in the clear. The man had partners who now surrounded LaPierre and began to threaten him. Then the police entered the car, and LaPierre let them take over.
This was not the first time LaPierre had jumped to the rescue. In 2015, he helped rescue a one-year-old and his mother from a car accident. Last summer, he volunteered to search for a snake that went missing from a backyard cage in Newton. And a few years back, he helped stop a CVS drugstore robbery. "I just happen to be at the right place at the right moment," he says.
